What is the ideal length of CDR?

Answer:

A Competency Demonstration Report, or as it is better known by its short form – CDR is an important document for engineers. The report is essential in determining if your standards of education and engineering knowledge and engineering experience are up to the Australian standards. If you are planning on immigrating to Australia to work as an engineer and are applying for a visa, you must have a proper CDR written. It is a well-known fact that your visa application for work might be denied of your CDR is not written in a very professional manner.

Your report must meet all the guidelines that are set by the responsible association, Engineers Australia (EA). These guidelines are updated regularly and are available in the “Migration Skills Assessment”, a booklet that the EA publishes. There are rules that govern if you can even write a CDR for consideration, one of these Is that you should have completed your Graduation and also your Post graduation in a reputed engineering college in your respective field. You must also possess a certain GPA (Grade point average) which varies from country to country. So, be sure to check the official website of the EA before you contemplate on whether you can write a Competency Demonstration Report or not.

A well written CDR must have some components like:

Career Episode: This is one of the trickiest parts in writing a CDR. The reason being engineers who are not natively from Australia do not know exactly what skills the EA is expecting the candidates to possess. These are essentially essays which are very lengthy compared to your average writings. The EA also looks at your writing style in the career episode. This particular bit can span to more than a page or two as you will have to write three separate ones of about 1500 words each.

Summary Statement: A summary statement is simply a one-page long summary. In this page, you must be able to show your management and engineering skill. You must compulsorily use instances that you have written in your career episode and cross-reference the paragraphs from the career episode and also highlight your competencies. 1500 words

CPD: A Continuing Professional Development is another document that you have to write in your CDR. It is required for your migration skill assessment. This document essentially shows to the EA that you are continuingly keeping in touch with new developments in your field of study and engineering. Keeping up to date with the latest mechanisms and developments in your field is very important. The CPD has a very specific format to be followed. typically, about 1500 words

These are essentially what your Competency Demonstration Report will contain. Now, the ideal length for a well written CDR is about 7000 to 7500 words. Now there have been CDRs which are longer by almost a thousand or two thousand words that have also been accepted. It mostly depends on your experience, a person who has been working in the field for about 20 years will definitely have more to say. It is the content that you are writing inside the CDR which carries the most weight.